First images of 76405 Hogwarts Express Collectors' Edition!

The same people that provided the images of the box are not providing images of the sticker sheet and bags. You can find them at the usual place on IG.

Looking forward to see who the person is to recreate the engine in proper Great Western Railway livery once the instructions go online.

Seems like this should be more of the price point of the Disney Train. The platform is underwhelming and I don’t see Powered Up anywhere on the box, which I would expect.

@KaiserCoaster said:
"This looks amazing, but struggling to see how this even comes close to the rumored price."

What is the rumored price? Sorry if it’s above and I missed it.

The station's a bit feeble. The train looks brilliant... almost too brilliant. It wouldn't surprise me if this is an elaborate hoax!

Underwhelmed..it’s red.

@jturner_91 said:
" @minishark1000 said:
"Minifigs from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? Interesting, but the Ravenclaw Student and Hufflepuff Student seem to be unnecessary filler. "

From the final scene of Deathly Hallows Part 2, aren’t they? I agree about the filler pair though."

My bad, haven't seen the films in a looong time.

Neat images, very interesting to see.

Looks great for display. I will await further details although does seem the wheel base is not standard 6 wide, and the front bogies unable to turn so will still need the standard Harry Potter train set.

Is it just me or is it way too big to be proportional?

It’s definitely a nice piece, and while I understand it not working on regular track, it feels a bit wrong since it’s a train. I know there are the other Express sets if a track-compatible train is what you want, but still.

"I'm not going home. Not really." - Harry James Potter

Looks like a great set for someone who doesn't have lots of Harry Potter sets as your get an iconic train and lots of minifigs.

For me, I have lots of HP sets so a set like this isn't appealing as it's out of proportion to the other HP sets and really isn't much of a playset.

@jettar36 said:
"This should be called "crybaby forum". It does not matter what gets released. Doesn't matter what is included. There are always a handful of malcontents crying about what it should have been or what it should include."

Couldn't of said it better myself.

@Murdoch17 said:
" @MeisterDad said:
"Emerald Night vibes. Are those seperated rails?"

Yes... but it can't run on rails. 5+ studs between the rails, and 10 wide at the body, but wider at pistons. It also can't possibly go around curves. "

Boo!

Super whelmed. Too big to work with any other trains and tracks in a city layout, not motorized with round track, incomplete platform, only one car, nonsensical fig selection, and at least $100 of parts wasted on the built up track you'll never really see or notice. Very disappointed but happy I'm saving $500 I guess. If you like it, more power to you though!

It's way out of my budget, but I think it looks amazing!

£429.99 on the UK site.

Looking at the official pictures, a few new thoughts, some good, some a bit less so.

In my first impression, felt the passenger car was a bit small compared to the locomotive, but looking at better pictures that feeling is gone. And I love the intricate bogies. The classic train doors seem a bit on the small side, but that doesn't really bother me that much. Overall, great job!

The tender looks good overall, but the chassis looks rather simple, not even a hint of suspension detail. That's disappointing. The locomotive itself still looks pretty much perfect.

But then the platform: While I do like the design overall, I really don't like are the very obvious gaps in the stone arcs. I don't see how they could have done that better, but this looks like a typical case of if you can't do it right, just don't do it at all. It just reinforces my feeling this set would have been better off without that.

Nevertheless, pretty impressive set. But at €500, not for me.

LEGO hasn’t demanded to take the pictures offline yet? The lawyers must be needing some extra hours to bill. Probably trying to figure out who this ‘Armante’ is and how they can sue him for receiving the set early.

I love Harry Potter, I love LEGO, but it is far too big compare to normal LEGO train and far too expensive for a display set which looks awkward among the trains or among HP sets.
So I do not get it, what this set is all about?

Looks amazing but something bugs me that they didn't manage to round off the red bricks under the black roof on the carriages. In this day and age with the amount of slopes and curved bricks available I'm surprised by this.

I would prefer a section of the Glenfinnan Viaduct instead of a piece of platform 9 3/4.

Ok, easy pass, no motorization and lego track compatibility means 500 EUR less spent despite being so beautiful.

Ouch! 849NZD, I think Legowidow would kill me, it was bad enough when she didn't speak to me for a week after I bought Titanic.

Can we expect specially dedicated GWP by buying this set similar to star wars big UCS sets?

@Brickset, you can do the official release post now, it’s on LEGO.com…

Wonder how long it'll take for us to get any other epilogue figures.

It's beautiful at first glance, but once you get into it there are a few problems. The biggest is the boiler should be the same diameter all the way from the front to the bell. The little increases in size are bothersome. At this price point the focal point seal/crest on the tender should have printed, not a sticker. Love the wheel motion but this should have included powered up to run it.

@im2cre8iv said:
"How does a company like LEGO “accidentally dispatch” an unreleased (and unrevealed!) set??"

By an awarding winning display of absolutely spectacular incompetence or it was done deliberately by a disgruntled employee or by Lego themselves.

@MainBricker said:
"The great work of the great author JK Rowling gets another great set."

Are we not suppose to mention that name the woke people will not be buying this.

@reaper123 said:
" @jettar36 said:
"This should be called "crybaby forum". It does not matter what gets released. Doesn't matter what is included. There are always a handful of malcontents crying about what it should have been or what it should include."

Couldn't of said it better myself. "

I'd love to reference a specific scene in Scent of a Woman here, but I'm going with my better angels.

I'm a bit surprised by the scale of this set but am still not yet sure how I feel about it. I guess I was expecting something more like a Star Wars MBS or Tantive IV and less like a Star Wars Slave 1. It's a magnificent looking set but just doesn't go with anything else, sizewise. As such, it feels like mostly a display piece which for me just doesn't work as well as the micro-Hogwarts or the HP Icons. And once you throw in the price tag, it just seems like an easy pass. I had been concerned that this was going to be an unfortunately expensive must have for my Harry Potter loving family.

@xboxtravis7992:
The tricky thing is, from what I’ve been told, trains should be 12-wide to be in scale with the track. So this looks like it’s still too narrow for L-gauge, but they increased the gauge 5/8”.

@Blondie_Wan:
The only one I’ve had mixed on my order was when they had a bonus run on 5001623 and 5002127, where all you had to do was order any DC or TMNT item (even a clearanced keychain would trigger them). I ordered 76010 and 79118, and one of them got switched for 21113. I called, they sent the correct set, and told me to keep the Minecraft one. If it’s small enough, it’s not worth the return shipping to get it back, apparently. I actually read an article about Amazon sellers who end up paying a fortune to have Amazon dispose of their unwanted or returned merchandise because it’s cheaper than paying Amazon to restock them to the warehouse, which often costs more than the list price of the item.

As for this instance, I’d say several people are in trouble. Someone received that product wrong, someone put that product away wrong, and from the sounds of it several people shipped it wrong. Identifying data is present on every factory carton, so even though it may be a one-per-case deal where you’d never open the box, you would still be expected to match the text on the label with what’s on your screen. It may even go back to the factory, with this being mixed up on a pallet that was supposed to be something else.

@tomthepirate:
75955 can be anything but “nicely” motorized. The engine is not designed in a way that accommodates any motor bigger than a micro motor, let alone a gearbox to transfer power to the main drivers. You can put a 9v/PF/PU train motor in the tender, but that causes problems if your layout isn’t perfectly level, and the tender should have six wheels anyways. Before the pandemic, I was trying to motorize it without making it look like I’d motorized it, and hadn’t had much luck. I was hoping this one might be more accommodating, but looks like I’ll need to keep tinkering with the 2018 version.

As for the accuracy, I do know that the length of the cars changes significantly during the films. HP2 has ones that look twice as long as what was shown in one of the other films. And the doors aren’t nearly as small as on the previous version!

@Mr_Hankey:
From what I’ve observed, they don’t go full-Apple on stuff like this unless it’s tied to a movie that’s under a media-exclusive contract. If the studio took a fat check to provide exclusive access, you better believe they’re going to lean on toy companies like TLG to lean on sites like this to remove any evidence of those early pics. This series ended over a decade ago, so there’s not really any worries.

Big oops.

Reminds me of the time I ordered a rather common Swiss Army Knife model in used condition, and the seller accidentally sent a quite rare model that was released for the Victorinox 125th Anniversary instead.

@PurpleDave said:
" @xboxtravis7992:
The tricky thing is, from what I’ve been told, trains should be 12-wide to be in scale with the track. So this looks like it’s still too narrow for L-gauge, but they increased the gauge 5/8”."
Even when the exact numbers differ quite a bit depending from country to country, standard gauge (1435mm) trains usually are around 3 meters wide. So 12 studs wide wouldn't be too far off indeed.

Even in Japan, where most trains (the shinkansen being the most notable exceptions) run on cape gauge (1067mm), trains can be close to 3m wide, so almost triple the track width....I bet this would make appropriately scaled Lego trains just a tiny bit unstable :-)

@WizardOfOss said:
" @PurpleDave said:
" @xboxtravis7992:
The tricky thing is, from what I’ve been told, trains should be 12-wide to be in scale with the track. So this looks like it’s still too narrow for L-gauge, but they increased the gauge 5/8”."
Even when the exact numbers differ quite a bit depending from country to country, standard gauge (1435mm) trains usually are around 3 meters wide. So 12 studs wide wouldn't be too far off indeed.

Even in Japan, where most trains (the shinkansen being the most notable exceptions) run on cape gauge (1067mm), trains can be close to 3m wide, so almost triple the track width....I bet this would make appropriately scaled Lego trains just a tiny bit unstable :-)"

This one IS 12 wide!

@WizardOfOss said:
" @PurpleDave said:
" @xboxtravis7992:
The tricky thing is, from what I’ve been told, trains should be 12-wide to be in scale with the track. So this looks like it’s still too narrow for L-gauge, but they increased the gauge 5/8”."
Even when the exact numbers differ quite a bit depending from country to country, standard gauge (1435mm) trains usually are around 3 meters wide. So 12 studs wide wouldn't be too far off indeed.

Even in Japan, where most trains (the shinkansen being the most notable exceptions) run on cape gauge (1067mm), trains can be close to 3m wide, so almost triple the track width....I bet this would make appropriately scaled Lego trains just a tiny bit unstable :-)"

In the U.S. standard track is four feet wide and train cars are ten feet wide. This lines up nicely with the current L gauge track as 10 wide cars look right.

@Darth_Dee said:
"In the U.S. standard track is four feet wide and train cars are ten feet wide. This lines up nicely with the current L gauge track as 10 wide cars look right."
4 feet 8,5 inch.....that's more than just a few millimeters off. I just hope US train manufacturers are more precise, otherwise it would be a rather bumpy ride ;-)

@Murdoch17 said:
" @MeisterDad said:
"Emerald Night vibes. Are those seperated rails?"

Yes... but it can't run on rails. 5+ studs between the rails, and 10 wide at the body, but wider at pistons. It also can't possibly go around curves. "

It's not meant to be played with by the video on the item's page. Static display with a cog to turn the wheels on the engine and that is it. Guess MOC'ers know what to do if they buy the set ;)

@WizardOfOss:
Thinking on it a bit, the engine should be narrower than the cars behind it. Not only are the cars far less top-heavy, but the design of most steam engines is framed between the main drivers, which sit right on the rails. The lower structure of the passenger cars is going to involve a heavy metal frame, while the upper portion can be a relatively lighter box made of wood, and mostly hollow at that. Regardless, it makes the shift to 8-wide Speed Champions seem even less compatible with a train layout.

@Paperdaisy:
To be fair, people have been kinda gun-shy on reddish-brown, even though that came out around the time they announced that they had solved the problem, and sat on the news long enough to make sure the fix worked. Those crocs should be perfectly fine, based on their statement, but we still had people in 2020 and 2021 demanding that TLG fix the problem, and then refusing to believe anyone who told them it was already fixed.

@Boettner_Builds:
I’m counting ten studs across the front buffer, and again across the roof over the controls. The piston cylinders look like they might be twelve studs wide, but I don’t count them the same way I don’t count fenders and sideview mirrors on 6-wide cars.

@PurpleDave said:
"Thinking on it a bit, the engine should be narrower than the cars behind it. Not only are the cars far less top-heavy, but the design of most steam engines is framed between the main drivers, which sit right on the rails. The lower structure of the passenger cars is going to involve a heavy metal frame, while the upper portion can be a relatively lighter box made of wood, and mostly hollow at that. Regardless, it makes the shift to 8-wide Speed Champions seem even less compatible with a train layout."
For most steam engines the cylinder block will be the widest part, although that still has to be within the loading gauge. That's also the case with this Lego model, though a bit more pronounced than on actual trains (2 studs beyond the main width of 10 studs = 20%....that's a lot....).

The passenger car appears to be 12 wide, so indeed slightly wider than the engine. One thing to keep in mind is that these are based on British trains, which are about 20cms narrower (max. 2,896mm) than European or US trains. Considering the tracks are 5 studs apart which would mean the top of the tracks are almost 6 studs apart, which would mean the cars are about as perfectly scaled to the tracks as they could.

As for being top-heavy, I doubt that would be that much of an issue with actual trains. After all, railways use very wide curves (at least on main lines), and those are banked. Also, the slightly conical shape of train wheels make them lean into curves a tiny bit. Not much, but essential for stability of actual train and also negating the need for a differential on those wide curves. And even with steam engines, most of the weight will still be pretty low, with the very heavy frame, cylinders and firebox. The boiler might look massive, but is in large part hollow (filled with tubes), and therefore relatively not that heavy.

Weight distribution of Lego models is rather different though, and those tight curves are pretty much ridiculous. For an interesting comparison: As a kid I also had Fischertechnik trains. Those were about as wide as Lego trains, but ran on standard HO track, so very narrow. The way those were constructed meant that despite their size most of the weight would be pretty low, with a center of gravity probably just above the wheels. And as a result they were ran much more stable than you might have expected from the looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kthREg9C2Mg

About the 8 wide speed champions....those should actually scale quite perfectly with 12 wide trains....

As for the Crocodile, I have been on the fence for that one for a long time. There was a lot to love, but the choice of making it a model that could also run impacted the looks a bit too much in my opinion. Nothing that can't be fixed obviously (hey, it's Lego!), but as it was a store exclusive for the longest time (and usually out of stock) it never got any discounts. And an expensive set with some major flaws to fix.....I don't like that. Only in the last phase it become available in other shops, and just when I decided I was gonna buy it (now a little below RRP).....it was gone and available sets doubled in price....

@WizardOfOss:
Conical wheels should make it lean out in the curves, not inward. One point of contact in the center of the inner wheel at the lowest point on the bearing surface of the wheel, two points of contact straddling the center (and a bit higher on the wheel as a result), means the inner wheel gets raised up as it goes into the curves.

@PurpleDave said:
" @WizardOfOss:
Conical wheels should make it lean out in the curves, not inward. One point of contact in the center of the inner wheel at the lowest point on the bearing surface of the wheel, two points of contact straddling the center (and a bit higher on the wheel as a result), means the inner wheel gets raised up as it goes into the curves."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzgryPhtc1Y

It's not for me, if it had another carriage, and different minifigs, then I could have been tempted despite the high price tag. However the only minifigs I'm interested in are the older Harry, Ginny and children ones.

Waaaaay too many minifigures. If this is really a collector's piece, like to display on the shelf, then all these minifigres will just clutter it up. Half of them are the main three characters, so you can't display them at the same time. If you ask me, it really just feels like a way to bloat the price an extra hundred dollars.

@WizardOfOss:
Okay, I had been thinking more strictly in terms of geometry, rather than physics, and especially with the unrealistically sharp curves of LEGO track. Also, one of the train heads in my LUG advised me to remove the traction bands from the driver wheels on one side, to basically act as a slip clutch, suggesting the physics shown in the video breaks down in L-gauge applications. At some point, the radius of a curved track can become so tight that the center of the inner flange, and two points on the outer flange, will press into the insides of the rails and bind up, preventing the bogey from traversing the curve. Just shy of that point, the outer flange will still rub against the rail at two points, forcing the entire wheel set to the inside. This won’t happen on real trains because the curves have to be gentler or risk putting too much strain on the couplings, but LEGO track geometry appears to be based more on their roadplates than actual train tracks. Even hobby trains probably can’t accommodate realistic curves without needing a layout the size of an Olympic track.

True, but I mentioned this as a difference between actual trains and toy/model trains, and why being a bit top heavy isn't that much of a problem with real trains. For the most part those could even do without flanges, at least on straights and normal curves. For toy/model trains that's just not an option. The flange is what keeps those from derailing, but indeed that's also that would make them tip over.

And obviously the (relative) size of the flange doesn't help either. With toy trains it's all about keeping them on track as long as possible, but then when it does go wrong it will go really wrong. For real trains the flange will to some extent keep the train on track in situations where the conical shape doesn't cut it anymore, but when it does go wrong it's better to let it just derail (and hope for the best) than tip over.

And yeah, realistic curves aren't really an option for most people, therefore the physics that make real trains work simply don't scale down well. I mean, a few months ago I bought a Rokuhan Shorty Z-scale set ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vUxLUjgBd0 , I still have to decorate it), that has 45mm radius curves. At 1:220 scale, that means a real world 20 meter circle, less than the length of a normal passenger car....

Apparently, this is not the usual scale for trains. Too bad. Without the ability to run on an actual track, this set is both expensive and without a point.
Plus $ 500.00 is a lot to spend for such a set.